A sudden, unexpected, and devastating fire has destroyed the lovely little heritage town of Lahaina on Maui, which for Hawaii, was also a vibrant tourist destination. Thirty-six people at last count were killed and given that this is early in the catastrophe and communications about evacuations were down early, it may rise. The town and all its historic artifacts, its Front Street promenade, named one of the “top ten greatest streets” by the American Planning Association, are gone. Lahaina’s giant banyan tree, planted in 1873, and the largest in the U.S., is subject to on-again, off-again reports about whether it survived the inferno. We still don’t know.

Here in California, pretty much everyone is affected — with huge numbers of us having family and friends who live in Hawaii and almost everyone having vacationed there. San Francisco’s mayor, London Breed, was reportedly vacationing on Maui when this happened. My sister was scheduled to fly into Maui on Friday for a layover on her way to San Diego. Right now, I’m not too hopeful about that happening. It’s sad as can be, and natural for people to try to make sense of it because it was such a freak, total disaster. One day all is fine — and within minutes, it’s all gone.

But some characters are yawping the stupidest, most unhelpful, knee-jerk explanations on a disaster they cannot possibly know the cause of, glibly blaming it all on global warming and conservatives, of course.

Some choice examples:

Evidence? He has none. He just doesn’t like what happened, and global warming is a convenient explanation for most everything.

No, it’s not “your” island, it’s not all on fire, and dollars to donuts, you don’t live in Lahaina now since you’ve got a lot of time to prioritize tweeting and blaming Republicans.

Yeah, sure: Republicans did it, even though Hawaii is run by Democrats as a fully deep blue state.

And this one takes the top seed spot in this Twitter dunce derby:

Apparently, this supposed Hawaiian expert hasn’t looked up the origin of the name “Lahaina” on its Wikipedia page. We’ll do it for him:

Lele was an ancient name of Lahaina. The Hawaiian language name Lā hainā means “cruel sun”, describing the sunny dry climate.^[3] Lahaina’s historic district averages only 13 inches (330 mm) of rain per year, much of which occurs from December to February.

Well.

Seems Lahaina since its founding has always been a hot, bone-dry place with average temperature in the 80s year round and a very dry climate. The dry climate, coupled with the dry season, which has led to drought in some parts of Hawaii, coupled with a hurricane 800 miles to Hawaii’s south which didn’t even touch the island, but sent high winds, and Lahaina itself being made of closely spaced, old dry wooden structures, is the confluence of factors that led to the sudden conflagration.

That’s not global warming, that is bad luck, particularly since they know how to deal with hurricanes and volcanos, but rarely get a wildfire event like this. Given that recent wildfires in Greece and California were known to have been started by arsonists, sometimes greenie arsonists, we can’t rule out that the fires were set by arsonists at this point, either. How was the greenie forest management in Hawaii? We know that in California, bad forest management with uncleared brush stuck out like a sore thumb, given that some surrounding states and Mexico with comparable climates, endure no such conflagrations. The fire may have been the work of arsonists, downed power lines, bums at a campfire — the investigators will find out. None of this has anything to do with global warming which is the knee-jerk go-to any time a bad weather event happens, as if bad weather events never happened before lefties got excited about global warming.

The press has also started in on blaming climate change and those who oppose handing over absolute power to Democrats supposedly to “fix” the non-existent phenomenon:

Were these the same ‘experts’ whose word was infallible as they called for lockdowns to solve the pandemic?

Somehow, they don’t live up to their billing. The only thing they live up to is being wrong.

The disaster is barely ending and the scope of it now is unknown. Is it too much to ask that focus be made on helping the people of Lahaina before pointing fingers and getting hysterical, calling for More Government? Not to leftists, who are making asses of themselves as the little town strives to clean up and rebuild. Maybe they should help them instead.

Image: Twitter screen shot